With the growth of age-restricted products such as lottery tickets, adult magazines, guns and ammunition, fireworks, condoms, smoking patches, medical supplies, alcohol, tobacco, vehicles, and rental movies, as well as age-restricted services such as gambling, movie theaters, and adult entertainment and licensed establishments, businesses and governmental agencies have had to develop policies to determine proof of age. The use of driver licenses to serve as identification in various applications has grown to include applications such as the purchase of alcohol, tobacco or lottery products, as well as for gambling in casinos, movie theaters, allowing ingress into licensed establishments. All of these applications have an age requirement for the purchase of a product at a point-of-transaction or for ingress into an establishment, and the driver license is the document used to provide age identification and all age verification is commonly accomplished in a relatively quick manner.
There are various forms of identification that are commonly accepted by businesses and government agencies as proof of age. The most convenient forms of identification are government issued documents such as a driver's license, passport, social security card, voter's registration card, and immigration card. Another example of an identification document is a smart card that contains memory provided by an embedded integrated circuit. These documents provide personal information regarding the authorized bearer of the identification document in at least one machine-readable medium such as a barcode or magnetic stripe. Many identifying documents have more than one machine-readable medium for storing identifying information.
For example, a driver's license typically includes a photograph, printed textual information, and visible encoded information such as a barcode. In some cases a magnetic stripe provides a higher level of security and additional information regarding the bearer. For example, the information stored in the magnetic stripe of a driver's license may include identifying information about the authorized bearer, such as eye color, hair color, height, weight, and biometric patterns. The barcode and magnetic stripe may also include data related to ascertaining the age of the bearer. Alternatively, the above information may be stored in the memory of an embedded integrated circuit on a smart card.
There is also a need to authenticate the contents of a driver license, such as authenticating identification for credit card and check writing at point-of-sale. Further uses include authenticating driver licenses in police cars, ports of entry such as domestic and foreign airports, seaports, rail stations and border checkpoints, and points of entry to government/military buildings and other sensitive areas. Verifying identity is also important in other areas such as child day care centers and post offices to verify parcel pick-up and drop-off.
The problem of readily available fraudulent identification cards has cost many retailers fines, loss of tobacco and liquor vending licenses, and subjected them to other forms of civil and criminal liability. Over the years, various attempts have been made to prevent or detect the use of fake identification cards, but without a great deal of success. To help prevent the use of fraudulent identification, government agencies have begun issuing new driver licenses with embedded code, or even encrypted coded information, with machine-readable formats that conform to industry/governmental standards.
Establishments wishing to avoid the sale of tobacco or alcohol to minors may check the photograph and date of birth printed on driver's licenses. However, many youths and others have easy access to counterfeit identification. Accordingly, there is a need to confirm the correct age of a customer wishing to purchase alcohol, tobacco and other age-controlled products and services by reading encoded data on at least one machine readable medium.
Early prior art methods of consumer personal and preference data capture involved the use of paper ballots, and the manual entry of handwritten information from these paper ballots. Using paper ballots for data collection and personnel for manual data entry. Traditional analysis of this data is conducted with spreadsheets.
More recent prior art identity verification methods and products involve services and data collection systems that include cumbersome and outdated equipment, if available at all, and often go unused since it is labor intensive to verify ID's. This equipment is typically non-user friendly and the equipment and manpower are typically underutilized resulting in a lack of information sharing within industries that could otherwise benefit from sharing such as the bar & beverage industry, special interest groups like MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), the tobacco industry, and health organizations and associations.
Although company specific loyalty and rewards cards have been around for many years, there has been no attempt to use a standard form of identification such as a driver's license to identify consumers by several companies and tie multiple company specific customizable messages, such as “Good Customer” or “Banned From This Store”, to each. Furthermore, there is currently no way to easily set flexible rewards in varying degrees of granularity down to a consumer specific level. There is also a problem of identifying “double dippers” or multiple people trying to get restricted access using a single piece of identification or multiple copies of the same piece of ID. Existing methods rely on the person responsible for ensuring restricted access to identify “double dippers”.
As well, capturing email addresses has been a relatively tedious task. It has been typically accomplished in the past by collecting email addresses using paper ballots. In instances where consumers were eligible to win a prize for providing the ballot information the prize was awarded simply by putting all the ballots in a box and randomly drawing one to select the winner.
What is needed is a method of authenticating the contents of identification cards so that any access to a product or service having an age requirement is satisfied at the time of access in a quick and convenient manner, to safeguard businesses and others against the penalties that may otherwise be encountered from the use fraudulent identification cards. What is further needed is a way to collect demographic data efficiently on a mobile computer in a manner that minimizes the data entry time. Currently, demographic data is largely collecting using paper based systems. In cases where mobile computers are used, the process of entering data is very time consuming.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for an improved method and system for remote data capture, storage and manipulation.